A very large number of hoods are required daily throughout the world. While earlier, they were used primarily for private purposes for protection of hairstyles, today there is predominantly a commercial use, for example in the food industry or in the manufacture of electronic components. In handling and packaging foods as well as in processing electronic components, such as, for example chips, printed circuit boards and similar products in clean rooms or ultraclean rooms, an essential condition is that hairs of the worker do not enter the production cycle, thus will not be packaged or will not be processed in any form with the foods or, in the case of electronic components, will not interfere in the manufacture thereof nor adversely affect the function of the end products.
For this reason, the employees in these enterprises that are occupied directly with the processing, manufacture, or packaging of these products wear hoods, which, on the one hand, prevent undesired contaminations or adverse effects on the products due to hairs, and, on the other hand, also protect and hold the hairstyles and hairdos of the persons involved.
For hygienic and also for practical reasons, in most cases, hoods for one-time use are involved, which the workers put on at the beginning of the work shift and discard at the end of the work shift.
This has as a consequence that, on the one hand, the cost for such hoods must be set extraordinarily low, since the considerable number of hoods required can also be correspondingly should a relevant cost factor in the respective enterprise. On the other hand, of course, there is also an interest in the fact that the hoods kept in stock correspondingly take up little space in the rooms required therefor and that for environmental reasons and with consequent consideration also with respect to the costs of disposal, it is absolutely necessary to no longer deal with large quantities of waste that must be disposed of.
Thus, hoods in the form of hair nets have proven particularly suitable and are widely used throughout the world.
Hoods in the form of hair nets are known, for example, from DE 18 12 345 U1, DE 24 16 375 A1 and DE 24 61 881 A1. They comprise a plurality of meshes of a net. In the outer meshes of the net, in this case, an elastic thread is integrated in the finished hood, running around the periphery thereof, this thread holding the hood on the head of the wearer. Seen from the front over the head to the back, on the one hand, and seen over the head from left to right, on the other hand, the number of meshes is of approximately the same order of magnitude, but need not be completely identical.
The production of hoods is automated as much as possible, for cost reasons. Production is carried out by continuous generation of a mesh net on so-called Raschel machines. Two additional elastic threads are fed onto the outer paths or longitudinal sides of the produced strand of the mesh net on these Raschel machines. The strand that is formed with the two elastic threads adjacent to the outer longitudinal sides is rolled up, so that a very large roll of relatively continuous material if formed.
Individual hair nets or hoods are then produced from this strand. In this regard, the proposal has been set forth in DE 14 57 412 A1 to automatically collect a certain length of the strand during its formation after this length has been obtained, and to separate it by a brief heat shock of a bonding air jet of a plastic bonding torch and to bond the separated end with the formation of a small bonding bead.
This procedure, however, has not succeeded in practice due to technical difficulties.
Conventionally, rolls with the strands that have still not been separated into hoods in this way are then transferred to another processing site, where a length of the produced strand is removed manually each time from this roll by workers, this length corresponding approximately to the diameter of the hood to be produced. The two elastic threads are then knotted at the end of the strand provided for the hood. Subsequently, the two threads are again knotted at the other end of the strand provided for the hood and in this way all threads of the net lying in between are also collected. Then, seen from behind this second knot, [the hair net] is cut off from the end of the strand, and the two elastic threads as well as the threads of the hair net are now separated. After this, another knot is introduced on the end of the remaining strand, and the procedure is repeated. The individual hair nets that are formed in this way thus possess the mentioned threads running around [the outer periphery], which technically comprise two threads, each of which surrounds one-half of the hood, and these are knotted or sewn to together.
Each of the hoods manufactured in this way is then folded together and usually placed between a folded piece of tissue paper. A plurality of these tissue paper sheets, each of which is provided with a hood, is then made up into a package. Approximately 144 of these pieces of tissue paper, each containing a hood, are usually disposed in one sales unit.
The single packaging is necessary so that each time the user can rapidly remove a hood that he/she requires, with little lost time. In view of the structure of nets, a packaging of a plurality of unseparated hoods is not expedient, since these would be found inside one another and would be difficult to separate and to isolate manually, and thus one must take into consideration a considerable loss of unusable hoods that are tangled up inside one another.
The packaging of individual hoods in pieces of tissue paper is very labor-intensive and thus also a cost factor, which contributes considerably to the total costs for such otherwise inexpensive articles.
Another problem arises for the users who must dispose of the tissue paper, which is annoying in locker rooms given the haste in donning and removing the hoods and also leads to a considerable amount of tissue paper waste.
In view of the considerable quantities of hoods and thus the considerable amount of tissue paper that is used for this purpose, the weight of the tissue paper that is used is also another disruptive factor in transport and disposal.
It would be desirable if there were possibilities for the production or the transport or even for the type of structure of hoods that would lead to a reduction in labor expenditure or also to a reduction of the other problems.
The problem of the invention is thus to propose a method with which a different type of production of hoods is made possible.